W&l Is Resting Place For Lees

Old Virginia

April 16, 1995|By PARKE ROUSE Columnist

Since Greek and Roman times it has been customary for nations to bury heroes in public shrines, like Napoleon's Tomb in Paris or Grant's Tomb in New York City. That's why Robert E. Lee was entombed after he died in 1870 in a crypt built onto the chapel of Washington College in Lexington, where the Confederate commander had served as president for five years after the Civil war.

The controversy is generally forgotten now, but opinion was strongly divided after Lee's death on where he should be buried. Richmonders wanted to build a Confederate valhalla, called Battle Abbey, to inter southern Civil War heroes. But Washington and Lee University - renamed after Lee died and his son Custis Lee became W&L's president - felt the best site was the chapel on the campus Lee had helped design.

Aided by the Lee family, Lexington won over Richmond and kept Lee's tomb there. Today the chapel, enhanced by Edward V. Valentine's famous recumbent likeness of Lee resting after battle, is visited by thousands yearly. A mile away in Lexington Cemetery are the remains of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, who lived in Lexington when he taught at the Virginia Military Institute. Wisely, the Lee crypt was built with burial spaces for many Lee descendants. The latest addition was the remains of the Lees' unmarried daughter, Anne Carter Lee, who died at age 23 of typhoid fever in 1862 near Warrenton, N.C., and was long buried there.

At the outbreak of the war, "Little Annie," as Lee called her, was taken by her mother from the family home, Arlington, on the Potomac River across from Washington, to a North Carolina resort that no longer exists but was then known as White Sulphur Springs. She was not a strong child, and her mother, Mary Anna Custis Lee, thought the curative waters of the springs might help her. When she died she was buried on the grounds of the springs and her tomb marked by an obelisk, carved from granite by an invalid Confederate veteran. Gen. Lee could not be present for the burial, but two of his three sons were.

After Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox and while he was president of Washington College, he made a trip to Warrenton with his daughter, Agnes, to see the grave of little Anne. He was ill of a heart ailment, but he wanted to see Anne's grave before he died. Hoping to make the trip without public fanfare, he arrived in Warrenton without a hotel reservation. However, Willie White, a 26-year-old Confederate veteran, was at the train station, and when he saw the South's idol, he insisted on taking him and his daughter to his house for the night.

The word got out that Lee was in Warrenton and the next morning when he went out to ride to Anne's grave he found his carriage full of flowers. All along the road, as Lee and his daughter traveled, people gathered to applaud them. As author Manly Wade Wellman wrote, people came to get "a glimpse of a living legend of grace, valor and nobility."

The Lees intended that Anne's grave should remain undisturbed, but in recent years vandals desecrated the site with beer cans and hoodlums toppled the marble obelisk. Lee survivors asked for Anne's remains be moved to the Lee crypt beneath the chapel in Lexington.

Residents of Warrenton were divided in their response to the Lees' request. Some wanted to keep the grave in North Carolina, but columnist Dennis Rogers advised otherwise in the Raleigh News and Observer: "As much as we respect the memory of Anne Carter Lee and want to keep her with us forever, we must respect her father even more. She was ours for awhile but she is his for the ages. ..."

Rogers referred to Lee's desire that Anne's grave should be revered and maintained with loving care in North Carolina or else moved to Lexington.

The reburial occurred Sept. 29, 1994. Thus she joined her parents; her three brothers, Custis, William Henry Fitzhugh and Robert E. Lee Jr.; and her three sisters, Mary, Agnes and Mildred Lee. (None of the Lee girls ever married).

Shortly after I graduated from Washington and Lee in 1937, the body of Lee's father, Gen. Light-Horse Harry Lee, was disinterred at Cumberland Island, Ga., and was also moved to Lee Chapel. The old Revolutionary War general had died while visiting his friend, Gen. Nathanael Greene.

Several direct descendants of Robert E. Lee survive today, all descended from his two sons who married. They include great-grandchildren Robert E. Lee IV and his sister, Mary Lee Bowman (Mrs. Smith Bowman), both of Northern Virginia.

Many Lee family portraits and documents were left by Custis Lee to Washington and Lee on his death in 1913, and are exhibited in Lee Chapel. Once exhibited there also was the skeleton of Traveller, the general's warhorse, but it is now interred on the Washington and Lee campus.